Perhaps this might help you?
From Saint Thomas Aquinas
That all Things aim at Likeness to God
All things evidently have a natural appetite for being, and resist destructive agencies wherever they are threatened with them. But all things have being inasmuch as they are likened to God, who is the essential subsistent Being, all other things having being only by participation. All things therefore have an appetite for likeness to God, making that their last end.
4. All created things are some sort of image of the prime agent, God: for every agent acts to the production of its own likeness: now the perfection of an image consists in representing its original by likeness thereto: the image in fact is made on purpose. All things then exist for the attaintment of the divine likeness; and that is their last end.*
*Note
Some attribute or other of the Creator is relucent in every creature, according to the being which it has and the energy it displays, not however that attribute which serves best the immediate purposes of man, and ministers most to his security and comfort. This world is not exactly built for an hotel.
It reveals to me that Thomas Aquinas was wrong about an important issue. Created things DO NOT contain an “appetite for likeness to God, making that their last end.” Man is born in sin and seeks not God nor can he draw near to God lest He is drawn. Flowers and birds have comprehension of their creator - they glorify Him none the less by being as He created them. We glorify Him by being as He created us - in the beginning, when He created Adam and Eve and there was no sin. This is why being born again is cause for celebration in Heaven - we THEN can glorify our Father and Creator by being how He intended us to be.
“All things then exist for the attaintment of the divine likeness; and that is their last end.” This sounds so much like pantheism that I wonder if this explains a bit of the universalism apparent in some RCC doctrine.
No, the quote from Aquinas certainly does not alter what the Scripture says - that people are born in the image of their parents, incapable of doing anything good, in need of Christ for life itself - and the good works that follow the new birth.